


The Moon, the Sun, and the Truth

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [10]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Angst, Angst and Humor, Earth-3, F/M, Friendship, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, Janus the Bicameral Man, Mirror Universe, Mythology References, Owlman is a monster, Second Chances, better bonding through scars, minor appearance by Vicki Vale, why murder is bad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-19
Updated: 2015-02-27
Packaged: 2018-03-13 17:24:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3389993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Heroes aren't born. They're made.</p><p>And with friends like Bruce Wayne, who needs enemies?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Heads

The silver disc spins high under tasteful low lighting, and a tan, well-manicured hand snatches it out of the air and slaps it onto the back of the opposite wrist. Bright white teeth glitter in a handsome face, and the District Attorney for Gotham City lounges back in his plush booth.

"Heads you pick up the tab, tails I do."

"That wasn't funny the first time," says the billionaire on the other side of the table, very dryly. Harvey's wise to him, though. He's considered notable for his humorlessness, but it's really just a matter of learning to recognize his jokes. They're usually at your expense, and never involve smiling. Harvey laughs, and spins the lucky piece over his knuckles, not bothering to pretend to check, when they both know it can only have come up heads.

"You know I never bet except on a sure thing, Bruce."

"Yes, well, neither do I," says his patron with a significant quirk of an eyebrow, and Harvey accepts the subtle compliment without demur. He likes to think he's proven a good gamble.

They get back into Bruce's car, after the bill of course never comes up, because the restaurant knows to put it on Bruce's account and not bother him personally with things like paying for lunch. This was a working lunch, but it was also an indulgence, and Harvey needs to get back to the office in time to finish the afternoon's work. A housing regulation Bruce put through City Hall a few months ago is under judicial review, and they discuss what sort of pressure the judge in question is likely to respond to most of the way across midtown.

As they draw up in front of the gargoyle-speckled Courthouse, though, Bruce leans forward just before the limousine door opens. "Harvey."

Harvey gives him his full attention.

"The Jackson case. You might want to…let it go."

"Let it go?" Harvey shakes his head in incredulity. "Bruce, I have this man dead to rights for weapons smuggling, and you want me to let it go?"

He knows what this is, of course; he worked out years ago that Bruce has some kind of deal with the Owl. Mutual support, or something. He's not completely sure what Bruce is getting out of it that's worth his time, but he doesn't _act_ like a man being blackmailed, so there's that. Richard 'Brick' Jackson works for the Owlman, and if he offers information in a plea bargain, Harvey will finally have something with which to go after the city's most abruptly powerful crimelord. If not an identity, some solid testimony about his existence and criminal activity from someone who's actually _met_ the man.

Not, he admits to himself, that that's likely; Witness Protection is a sieve, everyone knows it, and the Owl's men are ready to die for him or they never get past entry-level positions. Jackson will go to prison without giving up a word, but apparently he's useful enough that the Owl has asked Bruce to lean on Harvey.

Bruce shrugs. "Pursuing it might end badly," he says, with the smooth bland tone Harvey envied from the time they first met, the way it hints at layered meanings under the obvious words.

Or, Harvey allows, it might not be about Jackson himself. It might simply be the Owl showing the world the kind of protection he can offer his loyal followers; able to call off the hounds of the law with a word, in the face of the most compelling evidence.

People already say enough about corruption in Gotham; Harvey's not ruining his own credibility for all time by jumping at a kingpin's word, even word passed via a major campaign contributor.

"Just a piece of advice," says Bruce. "From a friend." He smiles, and Harvey smiles back.

"Thanks for thinking of me, Bruce," he says.

"I try." Bruce shakes his hand, and they exchange the usual farewells, before Harvey actually gets out of the car.

"Oh, and Harvey…" Bruce's voice stops him on the sidewalk, and he turns back, squinting a little to see into the dimness of a cave of tinted glass, from where he stands in full sun. "Congratulations on your anniversary."

Harvey produces his best grin. "Thanks. Don't call for me at the office tonight; I'm taking Gilda out. Come Hell or Major Crimes Unit."

Bruce smirks and nods him a farewell before the chauffeur swings the door shut, leaving the District Attorney to step around a panhandler, mount the steps into the courthouse, and take the elevator up to his office, where he lets his smile vanish, and frowns out the window at the limousine just pulling away through the heavy midafternoon traffic.

Harvey owes the man a lot; mostly in the form of campaign funds but also in favors and strings pulled. He'd probably never have entered politics at all without Bruce's help and influence. If it was a _personal_ favor, that would be one thing; if one of Bruce's executives had crossed a major line and he wanted to deal with it privately to protect Wayne Industries' reputation, Harvey would be _entirely_ understanding, and let the matter slide.

But Bruce Wayne doesn't own him. Harvey can't afford to have him as an enemy, not if he wants to keep his career moving, but even _Bruce Wayne_ won't throw over someone he's invested this much in, for breaking ranks over something this small. He'll probably respect Harvey more for it, actually. He has enough bootlickers around; someone who actually _thinks_ can only be a relief. Heaven knows _he_ would appreciate having more than one assistant DA with a brain in their head.

Besides, whatever his links to the Owl are, Bruce can't really _want_ a weapons smuggler to go free. He's been a supporter of stricter gun control since…well, probably since he was eight. Everyone knows what happened to the Waynes. How could a man who doesn't believe the public can be trusted with firearms possibly _want_ Brick Jackson to be let off?

Harvey returns to his desk and absently considers the perpetual paperwork. He's not going after the Owl with everything he has. The game has to be played, and as long as the bulk of organized crime in Gotham is passing through the man's claws and he has the bulwark of Bruce Wayne to hide behind, he's pretty much untouchable—and trying to touch him directly will put Harvey on Bruce's bad side. He gets that. No gangbusting for him. Someday there'll be a breakdown of relations between Bruce and his pet criminal mastermind, and when that day comes Harvey will be sitting on a heap of evidence, but he can wait.

In the meantime, though…big weapons smuggling conviction will look good for the public, even if it doesn't do anything to stem the actual arms traffic, since Jackson's barely more than a pawn. That just means the Owl can afford to lose him. Let him consider it a message to his other subordinates not to get caught.

Harvey reviews major upcoming cases and grinds his way through paperwork for the next four hours, and then instead of continuing for a few hours more, as is usual, he packs certain documents into his briefcase and leaves the building with a nod to his secretary. The reservation isn't until six, but it won't do to risk being late.

Gilda meets him at the door in her slip, paints and brushes all cleaned up and put away in the studio along with her smock. Her hair is set into the kind of artful heaps of golden curls he's never been able to determine whether she somehow manages to do herself, or alternately manages to obtain from a salon without his ever detecting her going out to do so. He holds the massive bouquet he had ordered weeks ago out of the way as she stretches up to kiss him, and knows his smile is less than dignified when she breaks away.

"You're on time," she teases, running her hand down the side of his neck. "Are there any reports of flying pigs?"

"Not that I heard, but I was in a hurry and I've told the office not to call me for anything, so I might have missed it," he answers, which must pass muster because she rewards him with another kiss.

"Now honey," he says, when this one ends, "I know our neighbors have better things to do than spy, but Gotham's DA really can't be seen being ravished on the doorstep by a lady in her negligée."

Gilda blushes and lets him the rest of the way in. "For you," he announces grandly once the door is closed, presenting the bouquet, "my golden rose."

His suit is laid out on the bed when he goes upstairs, after Gilda goes to find a sufficiently large vase for the abundance of roses. He showers, quickly, and shaves off the hint of stubble that's grown since the morning before he changes into it, a cut above the sort of pinstriped thing he wears to the office, and stops to dig a little blue-velvet box out of his bedside drawer and tuck it into the jacket pocket before Gilda comes up. He struggles as always with his cumberbund but doesn't ask for help because if he were concentrating as intently on anything as she seems to be on her mascara, leaning close to the mirror at the back of her vanity table, he wouldn't welcome the interruption.

She does tie his tie for him, which isn't necessary but is sort of a ritual, like his zipping her into her dress—tie and dress complimentary but not identical shades of blue (too matchy is _gauche,_ apparently, in addition to being artistically void) and it's then that he reaches into his pocket and presents the little box. He might have saved it for the restaurant, but he doesn't _need_ to show off for an audience, and since she picked the blue dress for this evening…

Already smiling before she lifts the lid, Gilda lights up at the two perfect teardrop-cut gems lying on their little cushion.

Harvey grins, too. "Happy Anniversary, Gilda."

"Oh, Harvey! They're lovely. And sapphires are so much more _tasteful_ than diamonds at this size."

Diamonds this size would also have been an expense well outside his budget, as she very well knows; he's no Bruce Wayne, but he thinks that's a sincere opinion, not a dig. Besides, Gilda loves sapphires.

She smiles as she takes one out and turns it in the light. "And this would be why I got a blue silk dress for my birthday, wouldn't it?"

He shrugs. "I like you in blue. Matches your eyes." She raises her eyebrows, and he adds, "and brings out your hair and skin and all those lovely things."

Gilda rolls her eyes and laughs. "You did good, Dent," she says, and kisses him again.

She lets him hang her anniversary present in her ears before they leave the house, and they sail into _Le Fleur_ with her on his arm and opera tickets in his pocket for later. The food is perfect, the wine is excellent. They are young and beautiful and successful, and tonight is theirs to be happy.

Harvey Dent is on top of the world.

* * *

The next day, of course, he's back at the office, half an hour later than usual but still not technically late. He meets with Jackson and his suspiciously-expensive defense attorney one last time in hopes of striking a bargain for full disclosure on the smuggler's associates; is refused. The private attorney, one Ms. Madrigal, who began the meeting smirking only a little more subtly than Jackson, looks pinched and forbidding by the end. "Mr. Dent," she says, frosty, as Harvey packs up his briefcase. "I advise you to be _very certain_ this is the course you want to take."

Harvey snaps both clasps shut. "I believe that's my line," he says. Stands. "Good day."

"You won't get away with this, you son of a bitch," Jackson growls, fulminating in his handcuffs.

"Good day," Harvey repeats. "I'll see you in court."

Within the week, he does. Theoretically, considering the strength of the evidence, they could wrap this up in a few hours. But the defense attorney is determined to drag it out like a woman trying to wring blood from a stone, and Harvey is more than content to let it spin out a little into a show trial, since one of the reasons he's doing this is to show himself being tough on crime. There is, as always, a pretty serious gun homicide rate in Gotham this year. The kind of pieces Jackson brought in are part of why. It makes a good story; he's got several reporters lined up near the front of the viewing gallery, including that Vale woman who asked him much less confrontational questions in this press conference than usual.

So they sprawl on into the second day, and then the pace seems to have changed, Madrigal's arguments briefer and less vociferous, increasingly as though she's only going through the motions, until she calls Richard Jackson in his own defense, and the stocky, muscled mobster lies fairly transparently on the stand. Harvey goes forward to cross-examine him, rearranging his plan of attack in his mind to deal with the man's sudden decision to claim to be a construction worker, among other things. "You are Richard Jackson, also known as 'Brick?'" he asks, since for some reason Madrigal hadn't.

"That's right," says the defendant. "My ma called me Ricky."

Harvey raises his eyebrows at that but doesn't allow himself to comment. "And," he begins, stepping toward the witness stand with one hand upraised for dramatic purposes.

He sees something in the man's eyes, then, something fiercer than the surly hate he'd gotten used to, and he's been doing this long enough to transform his brief unease into action when the defendant's arm flies up. He spins away, ducking, more of a flinch than a real dodge. It would have saved him from a knife and bought precious seconds against a gun, but the thrown liquid splashes across a wide arc. Much of it misses him, to sizzle faintly on the floor.

More than enough finds its target.

It is hard to say whether he falls to his knees, clutches his face, or screams in agony first, though it is generally agreed that the scream in fact comes last, and it is what jolts the crowd into panic.

"Message from the Owl," Jackson hisses, almost inaudible under Harvey's voice and the others rising to join it. The cops that were standing by for security pile onto Jackson, too late, dragging him away as the courtroom erupts into hysteria. Two officers spare themselves from the perpetrator to drag the DA's hand away from his face; one promptly lets go to vomit at the base of the witness stand, when he catches sight of glistening flesh still being eaten away.

Reporter Vicki Vale vaults over the railing at the front of the stands, to throw the contents of both her iced coffee and her water bottle over the man's face in quick succession, then turns to shout into the yammering (and in some cases fleeing, presumably in case of more acid) audience for people to toss down any water they have.

Compliance is mixed and results in both airborne liquid without any container and some fairly threatening projectiles in the form of Nalgene and other tough reusable bottles, but the woman gathers up enough in the way of full containers to rush back to Harvey's side and continue rinsing the skin of his face (and, belatedly, the hand that received a contact transfer) clean of the acid, with a particular focus on the area around his right eye.

By this time his screams have dwindled to a sort of half-conscious whimpering.

When the EMTs arrive a few minutes later to find her still at it, one of them tells her she may have saved Mr. Dent's life. She hopes that _may_ means he could have survived without her, and not that his survival is still in question. She might not like the slick, dishonest DA, but that doesn't mean she ever seriously wanted him to die a horrible death. Especially not for doing something _right_.

It's a relief when they drug him unconscious before rolling him away.

* * *

They keep him sedated for some time—through the emergency treatment and then the first, most essential surgeries, saving everything that can be saved to keep the damaged tissues serving as a _face,_ which are definitely not something anyone wants to attempt on anyone conscious. After he wakes up, he's on a boatload of pain medications and none too coherent.

"Hey, honey," Gilda says, tucking the bouquet she brought under her chin so it's in his line of sight. "How are you feeling?"

He tries to smile at her, but his whole face is shot so full of muscle relaxants, to prevent him from destroying the surgeons' work, that it doesn't respond, and his breath picks up sharply.

When he realizes he's strapped to the bed, it takes so long to calm him down that the nurses just pump in enough morphine to knock him out again.

They manage, with the aid of quite a lot of drugs, to keep him quiet for a week before he starts demanding, with increasing stridency, to know the details of his condition. It's a few days after that before his doctor promises to let him see things for himself, and in the end it's been two weeks since the attack by the time he's allowed to sit up on the edge of his bed with all the bandages unwrapped and the muscle relaxants having been allowed to wear off.

The room is crowded with an orderly and a nurse along with the doctor, and all the flowers and cards and balloons he's received from his friends and supporters and employees and everyone who considers it politically expedient to make sure they send the injured DA some kind of get-well token. All the chocolates and fruit baskets not hand-delivered by people he trusts were summarily thrown out. He's recovering from an incredibly blatant assassination attempt, _honestly._ Most of the ones that were kept have been eaten by Gilda, while she sorted through the cards and things and made a list of the names, for future reference. She likes sweets more than he does, and she eats when she's tense, and she's spent a lot more time in this room _awake_ than he has.

Vicki Vale sent half a pound of shade-grown fair-trade coffee beans. He sent her a thank-you note that had very little to do with the coffee. Well. That coffee.

People keep trying to call what happened 'his accident.' He's let all of them know in no uncertain terms that that is unacceptable. This was no accident; this was a carefully-planned chain of events. And there will be a reckoning for that.

"Now, remember," Dr. Astego cautions, calling him back to the stomach-lurching present. Gilda isn't here because he can't deal with her reaction at the same time as his. She's _never_ been in the room while the nurses changed the dressings. He needed to know before she did. "You still have healing to do."

"Okay," Harvey says impatiently.

"And…please realize that you're very lucky to have very little loss of function. We now know you've suffered no impairment to your vision, and none of your major muscle groups are paralyzed."

"Give me a mirror," Harvey growls. He might be hospitalized, and traumatized, and very much not at his best, but he's had enough time to get his feet under him again. It is his right to know his own condition. If they attempt to stall any longer, he will not be held accountable for his actions.

Reluctantly, the doctor motions to the nurse, who lifts a small plastic hand mirror. Harvey leans forward and snatches it. He's had enough loss of agency recently, thank you.

He stares into his own face. Reaches up, slowly, with the unbandaged hand, to run his fingers over the damage, and flinches from the pain of it. "Mr. Dent, please don't touch—" begins the doctor, before the mirror clatters to the floor.

And then there's screaming again, not the agony from before, not even panic, quite. Rage. Horror. Loss.

_Rage._

Harvey fights off the doctor, the nurse, and two orderlies who rush in to stop him from tearing at the darkened, puckered, shiny scar tissue that has taken the place of half of his handsome face. As though he thinks his old self is hiding underneath, waiting to be dug up, though he doesn't, there's not enough coherency in him to think any such thing. He bloodies two noses, blackens three eyes, dislocates four fingers, and cracks a cheekbone before they get a needle of sedative into him.

* * *

Later, days later, when he's finally being released to outpatient care (including counseling and psychological evaluations), he finally faces a mirror again. His eye really is fine, he closed it in time, but the flesh around it has drawn back like it does on a half-rotted corpse, fixing it wide, white showing all around the iris, as though he is constantly panicked, or something worse. He tries a squint, hoping for a look of studied concentration, and only achieves homicidal rage.

At least it still closes. So does his mouth, though he has to stretch the right side of his lips out of their new resting snarl for it. The doctor was right. It could be worse. He could be faced with food dribbling out of his mouth with every bite and needing constant application of eyedrops to see, and a piratical patch to go to sleep. He could be half-blind, and hopelessly slurring his speech. He has lost almost no function.

He's hideous.

Completely, unspeakably hideous, with the slick, red-and-white marbled texture of his regrowing skin and scars, with the eye and the lips and…more than anything it looks like half his face is a week or so dead. Like Hel, he thinks suddenly, the Norse ruler of the dead—half her body was a corpse, though there's always been some disagreement about whether she was divided left from right or bottom from top.

Well, there's another thing to be grateful for, then: he isn't paraplegic. He could have been shot in the back and be in a wheelchair; instead of half his face looking dead, half his body actually _could_ be.

A lot of strides have been made with equal rights and accommodations for the handicapped, but that very-real helplessness would still have been worse than this. It _would._

Harvey _knows_ it would.

The saying is that _the mind is a plaything of the body_. It is catchy and less than accurate; the body would have to have intention and desire and, in essence, a mind of its own, to toy with anything. But this certainly is true: mind and body are not two. Harvey has always been drawn to Cartesian dualism, to the self as something existing outside the material shell, but if the break were so clean, brain injuries and psychotropic drugs couldn't cause such profound changes in personality. Harvey took a Neuroethics elective seminar in undergrad, to his continuing irritation ever since when dealing with mentally ill criminals and the question of their responsibility for their actions. The definition of a person is tied inextricably to their flesh.

And this undeniably is what he is now: horrifically disfigured. It will be the first thing people notice about him, forever. He will have to learn to live with ugliness, with unconscious revulsion in people's eyes.

Gilda still smiles at him, but ever since the bandages came off, sometimes he thinks—well. It's not like he can blame her, if she's taking a while to adjust. He's not the man she married anymore.

His friends are keeping a certain distance, even now that he can have visitors, but it'll all settle out once he's back in the game. Karen Undermoue, the only Assistant DA with a brain in her head, has been by six times with updates and requests for advice as she fills in for him. Her eyes tend to jump uneasily between the good and bad sides of his face, but she's joked gamely that when he gets back to looming around the courtroom, his famous cross-examinations are going to be that much more devastating now.

He takes comfort from that point: he can _use_ this. It's mostly loss, and it isn't as though he was an unimposing figure before, but still. That's something. He has menace. He survived another assassination attempt, this one far from unscathed, but he's on his feet again. Justice will not be kept down. He'd rather be appealing, but at least now he's unforgettable. If he _can_ still win elections like this, he will probably become an institution in his own right before long.

He should probably give up hopes of moving higher than DA for Gotham, though. There were hopes of being Attorney General for the state within five to ten years. Now…no. Never, probably.

It's alright. He will be alright. He will, because he must.

* * *

Less than a week later sees him mixing pain pills and whiskey. He knows it's stupid. Knows, and doesn't care.

Jackson was already easy enough to nail to the wall on the gunrunning charges, but he assaulted Harvey in _open court_ , in full view of an assistant DA, a city judge, a dozen police officers, and considerable representation by the public, including the redoubtable newspaper reporter who possibly saved Harvey's life. There was no question that Karen would be able to put him away for decades.

Except he disappeared from custody between two and three o'clock this morning.

Harvey flips his double-headed silver half-dollar into the air, fumbles the catch, and closes his eyes against the world as his fists clench and the coin jingles across the smooth hardwood of the desk in his study.

The Owl never even _needed_ Harvey to get his man free. Yes, it would have been more useful to have him let off and not on the run from the law, but it had really been just for the sake of a power display. 'I can get my people off any charge, just because they're _mine_.' And when Harvey hadn't fallen into line, he'd used him to show off anyway. One of the Owl's minions burned off half a District Attorney's face, and is going without punishment. That's making a statement.

He expects the police aren't making anywhere near the appropriate effort. Not when there is profit in letting the Owl go his own way and a burned-off face in hindering him. No one's talking to him much anymore; even Karen's been getting less and less communicative since his psych report as 'presently unfit to return to public service' came through. Just because he lost his temper with the counselor! And now _this_.

And Bruce…Bruce knew. He went along with it. He must have. And now he isn't answering his phone.

"Dammit!" Harvey snarls, and a second later his glass smashes against the far wall. It's followed by a frosted-glass paperweight and the small brass plaque he was awarded as valedictorian. Its corner leaves a dent in the paneling. " _Damn him!_ That miserable, two-faced son of a—" _Two-faced_ his mind interrupts him, sarcastic at his own expense, and he bites down hard on the inside of his cheek and throws the pill bottle as well.

Since he doesn't want to break any more of his things, or pull Gilda out of her studio with another round of screaming, he contents himself with more profanity, in Latin this time. He studied it for practical reasons in the legal profession and for the cachet, but he doesn't know _any_ language with better curses—he is given to understand that Russian is even better to swear in, once you get the knack, but he doesn't know enough of the language to pull any of the really satisfying grammatical pile-ups of obscenity and rage.

Latin cursing is very anatomically precise, and somewhere in his detailed itemization of who in Bruce Wayne's genealogy was fucked in what orifice by what animal, he starts to calm down a little, both with the catharsis and the organized nature of the activity, and the soothing routine of making sure he conjugates the genitive case correctly.

The phone rings. Harvey stares at it, until it rings again, and then, jerkily, he answers.

"Hello."

"Harvey." Cool, not unfriendly. Just as if this was any other day. "I heard you were trying to get in touch with me."

Bruce. His hand shakes on the receiver. "You knew."

"You left messages."

Today is not a day on which he can appreciate Bruce's sense of humor. Probably no day ever will again. Harvey's jaw has clenched too tightly to pry apart. "You knew what the Owl was planning."

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean." That perfect bland voice, the one Harvey was always imitating, all subtle inflections and nothing you could pin anything on.

"It was a _test_ , wasn't it? To see how obedient I was. You bastard-born toerag, I thought you'd _appreciate_ not being _totally_ surrounded by sycophants and criminals, and you…you do _this…_ " His scarred right hand is plastered over his face again, the way it keeps doing even though he's not supposed to touch it except to apply the ointments and moisturizers.

"Mister Dent," the billionaire bites out coldly through the telephone. "You may wish to restrain your wild speculation before you find yourself being sued for slander."

Harvey sucks breath through his teeth and could not speak if he tried, because he's been on the other end of this, smacking people down with the weight of knowing they can't afford a lawsuit, can't afford to defy him or his clients. Crushing them. It felt so right when he was the one doing it.

"But Harvey…" Bruce's voice says through the line, deep and bland and almost, witheringly, kind. "I did warn you."

_Click._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Throw iced coffee on it' appears very, very low on the list of 'things to do to chemical burns,' especially when you don't know what substance is doing the burning, but it does come in just above 'nothing,' when no one else is doing anything either.


	2. Tails

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has a warning, but as it constitutes a spoiler, I've placed it at the bottom.

Harvey wakes up late the next day, so late he's almost run out of morning. His old sleep schedule's been out of reach since his injury, especially after early recovery had him sleeping fourteen hours a day and then the pain-induced insomnia later on cut him down to between four and six, but he hasn't done this very often. Sleep leaves him slowly, stickily, and he sits up in bed blinking (his distorted right eye not quite in sync with the other, because the lid has further to go, so that the world seems to scuttle momentarily to the right with every blink) and head aching from last night's substance abuse.

It takes a minute to realize something's wrong, and a little longer to figure out what: Gilda's vanity table. The jars and brushes and scattering of bright jewelry that usually clutter the surface and redouble to a trove in the mirror are gone. It's empty.

He gets up, frowns at his own creased pajamas but doesn't bother to dress. He's sure there's a good reason for this.

Gilda's studio is the obvious place to look—she spends most of her time there, after all, when she's in the house. Not only is she missing, when he looks in, so are all her paints, and a good percentage of the finished canvases.

When he finally catches up to her in the front hall, straightening her hair in the mirror with a suitcase by her feet, it's only a confirmation of what he'd already figured out.

"Are you going to be gone long?" he inquires.

She jumps, pulling her hands out of her hair almost guiltily, and thins her lips at him, and then her expression softens a little, and she looks away. "You could say that," she answers quietly. Licks her lips in a quick little dart of tongue, like the way she uses a bevel-headed brush when she's laying down a large-scale image. "Harvey, I'm leaving."

"What…" he asks stupidly. Going away for a while, to stay with her mother or something until he stops being a self-abusing moron, fine. He understood. It wouldn't be the first time they needed a break. But the way she just said that…. "What do you mean, leaving?"

"I mean I'm _leaving_ , Harvey. I'm not coming back."

Everything stops. His heart most of all. The pain that is the right side of his face flares and retreats, and he stares at her. "Gilda," he says.

"It's not because of your—injuries," she says. Lies. Her face is like stone, and she's staring over his shoulder again, avoiding his face. "You aren't stable, Harvey. I'm afraid to be alone with you, and I doubt you're getting your position back. I'll have the paperwork sent to you by Friday."

She isn't just leaving him. She's _divorcing_ him, as quickly as possible, because the pre-nuptial agreement gives her half of his total assets, and she has judged that he is sufficiently ruined that the total amount to which she has a claim is only going to decrease from this point forward.

Gilda was his only certainty. Was he never anything more to her than a…source of income? He wants to tell her that he loves her, wants to beg her to reconsider, wants to ask if she was lying to him all along. "Gilda, why…"

"I can't deal with this," she says. Not looking in his direction anymore. She picks up her final suitcase.

Fury clutches at his heart, and the scar that is his face seems to tighten against his skull. " _You,_ " he snarls, taking a step forward. And now she's looking at him again, backing up toward the door with her eyes wide in her face, and he realizes his hands have closed into fists and he has _never_ come this close to threatening her before. The young skin on his right hand sears with the pressure.

He digs his nails in, rocks on his feet to restrain the urge to advance on her, to frighten her again. "You promised," he says. "We promised to always be there for each other. I need you now, Gilda. More than ever. How can you…"

"Oh! You need me! And when I needed you?" There are tears swimming in her eyes.

"I've always given you everything I—"

"Oh, _things!_ " Gilda snaps. "You've given me those. You've done your duty. You've _provided_ for me."

"If that wasn't what you wanted—" He's not sure how he's going to finish that sentence. You should have said something? You shouldn't have married me?

"Where were you when I lost the baby?" Gilda spits. "Where were you when my sister died? When I had to put the cat down, even? Working!"

"I was there!" Harvey protests, because he _was_. He bought her cake and offered her any choice of kitten after Birchbark died, came home early when the news came about Mirianne, held her and promised as many times as she asked that he didn't think it was her fault she'd miscarried, not even a little, of course not. He loved her.

"For a few hours!" Gilda shoots back. "A day! Until I was over the worst of it! And then you had to get back to your real life, and I was alone in the house with my paints and whatever present you grubbed up to buy me off with. Well, I stayed through the worst of it. Don't tell me you _need_ me to _support_ you for the rest of your messed-up life! I'm not the one who turned this marriage into an exchange of goods!"

She spins on a long heel, then, strides back toward the door in a self-righteous swing of skirt and case. Harvey wants to scream. He wants to rush after her and throw her against the wall and tell her she has to get past him if she thinks she's going anywhere. He wants to fall to his knees and beg her forgiveness.

"Gilda—!" he manages to choke out, while she's framed by the doorway, backlit against the street, chiaroscuro in the early evening light. She doesn't look around, but she does hesitate, and he thinks, wildly, that this is his chance, his last chance. She cares enough to stop and listen. If only he knew the magic words. "I do need you," he tells her, helplessly. "Gilda, I love you so much."

If that isn't enough to stay for…but it isn't, and she's already moving again, not answering, and then the door swings closed—not a slam, not a gesture of rage, just a devastating— _click._

* * *

There's a long period after that where Harvey loses track of himself. On one level, he's completely aware of what he's doing, but it's a thin, brittle layer of awareness that seems to have no line of connection to long-term memory, as though whatever madness seizes him is like a drug or blow to the head that knocks the hypothalamus' information-transfer powers offline in the rush of other duties, and all he knows is the need to break, and break, and _break…._

He steadies out again in the ruin of what was their bedroom. He's completely destroyed the mattress and most of the furniture. There are wood splinters embedded in his right hand, and he's only just beginning to feel them. There are shards of broken mirror beside the remnants of Gilda's empty vanity, but he must have retained just enough sense not to do the breaking with his bare hands, because they aren't glass-tattered.

This…feels better. Gilda left it clean and neat, almost as if nothing had changed. It should _show_ when things are ruined beyond recall. When something is broken, everyone should be able to see.

This is not going to help his case for mental competency. Gilda didn't think he had a chance anyway.

Bruce Wayne is against him. He doesn't have a chance. He never did.

He shakes himself. No. No, he can't think like that. He feels scraped and raw and empty even of anger, even when he experimentally clenches his fist.

Ow. The hand was still sensitive from acid burns and now it's full of splinters. He sways to his feet. Tweezers and antiseptic behind the mirror in the bathroom. He can face the mirror for long enough to get it open. Now that Gilda's gone, he can cover or get rid of all the mirrors. Why not?

White down from a ruptured pillow drifts aside from the wind of his passage, and the deep blue glint of one sapphire teardrop stares up from the carpet.

One. Just one.

Before he knows it he is tearing the room apart again, first aid forgotten, searching every narrowest cranny for the other earring. There were two. _There should be two._ He scrabbles through the mess from the vanity drawers, but there is next to nothing valuable left. Emery boards and bobby pins and twenty-seven shades of nail polish—no gems. He cannot determine how he turned the bed over the first time, and so settles for taking it apart, and heaving the torn mattress aside once the bedstead is in pieces in a corner. He searches literally everywhere, and falls to his knees at last in an exhausted stupor beside the patient, baleful glare of the lone jewel.

It isn't there. The mate. Either it is lost, or Gilda took it with her. Took one, and left the other. On purpose? One half of a pair. His last present to her, split. It seems almost as though there is a message in that he is meant to discern, but he can't. There is only— _one_ is incomplete. There should be two. There should always be two.

The lonely gem is very light in his palm, the thin silver line of the fitting cold, and he thinks wildly, suddenly, that he doesn't remember what happened to his lucky coin after he dropped it last night. As if it _mattered,_ as if even his most whimsical side could ever believe in a lucky piece that was in his breast pocket when his face was burned off.

It's in his pajama pocket, though; he picked it up either when he was still drunk or while he was whited out, and he's pulled it out with his empty right hand, the metal already warm from lying close to his skin

He turns the silver coin over in his discolored palm, the sting of the splinters in his knuckles almost reassuring as he stares at the thing, a tiny moon in a sky stained red and yellow with bloody sunset. Its perfect, identical silver faces. He loathes it, suddenly. The lies his father told him—that you can control your fate, that staying loyal to law and order will guarantee its protection in return. He chokes on them. Every betrayed shred of trust, and he hears his own voice snarling in the shocked silence of the ruined room.

Then his left hand has come around, digging, _gouging_ at the head-side that happens to be turned up, trying to carve away that bland, calm face and its smooth right cheek. The post is silver, too, but it's also forged hard and stiff into its present shape, and the coin is old enough that it was cast for its bullion value and is practically pure. By the time the tiny bright hook is mangled past usefulness, the coin is marred with scratches that gleam bright from the hidden heart of the metal, and Harvey's throat aches with the growl that forces its way up it, and he turns the earring in his grip and keeps carving, with the sharpest edge of the teardrop, widening the scratches into gouges, until he's torn apart the face of the man who someone thought was worth marking on a coin, and someone else was careless enough to strike onto it _twice_.

He isn't crying. He's _not._

He falls asleep there, on the littered floor, ruined earring clutched tight in one hand, defaced coin in the other; only knows he did when he wakes up to the cold light of dawn reaching its fingers through the windows from which he cannot remember tearing the drapes.

Hot anger drained out of him as he slept, poured into the face of the silver half-dollar, and he wakes up cold, in his limbs and in his heart. Stands, brushing down and splintered wood from his pajamas, and walks very deliberately into the bathroom, where he yanks the bathroom mirror off its hinges, props it up next to the toilet with its face turned into the tile, and sits down on the edge of the tub to carefully prise the splinters out of his hand with a pair of tweezers.

When he's finished that, he showers, then spreads antibiotic ointment over the punctures, bandages them, and goes to figure out if he still has any presentable clothes in the overturned wardrobe, to go out in.

He has some shopping to do.

That evening, an hour or so past sunset, finds him in a poorly-lit hallway with a filthy carpet, wearing a shabby greatcoat, with a fedora pulled low over his face. The apartments in this building are disgusting rattraps, and tiny besides, but the landlord rents them cheap, by the week, without bothering with signed leases or any of that official trouble. Harvey walks with calm purpose along the foul brown carpeting until he finds the door marked _319._ He knocks.

"Yeah?" comes a suspicious voice from inside.

"Got news," Harvey grinds out, affecting a rough East End accent, with a hint of Chicago to cover any oddities a native might pick up.

He's moderately surprised when after a second, the bolt clicks open. "Better be good," the occupant of the apartment grumbles, pulling the door slightly ajar and peering around it grimly. "What's the pass…" He stops, as the visitor raises his chin enough to view his quarry's face, and opens his own to view in turn.

" _Dent?_ " says Jackson, staring up at him across the eight inch difference in their heights, and Harvey…Harvey _smiles_. With both sides of his face.

"Hello there, Ricky."

The man shifts. Harvey knows he has a sidearm on him, probably in the hand behind the door frame—paranoia is a life skill for people like him—but it doesn't matter. He pulls his own trigger, and the shotgun blast tears right through the door and into Jackson's leg.

Choking, the man goes down, but he's still bringing the pistol up toward Harvey's head, so he shoves hard at the door and ducks. The bullet winds up in the ceiling. Harvey shoves again, sending Jackson onto his back, forces his way into the room—paranoia is a life skill but _effective_ paranoia takes intelligence; Brick should have known better than to take a room with a door that opened inward.

He stomps on Jackson's forearm before the crook can gather what wits he has, grinds his heel in until the tendons give up and Brick loses his grip on his stubby semiautomatic. Lowers the shotgun to point into the other man's eyes. He got the kind that fires twice before you need to reload it; he's curious whether Jackson will think the just-discharged weapon is a bluff and do something stupid. An arms dealer should know better, but Jackson was only really ever a functionary in someone else's trade, and his stock never ran to anything as common as shotguns.

"What the _fuck,_ " Jackson groans, and then his eyes focus on the doubled barrel and he doesn't seem to think it's a bluff at all.

"Justice seems to be in short supply in Gotham," Harvey states mildly.

"A _crippled fucking lawyer?_ " Jackson asks, apparently of the universe, and Harvey shifts all his weight to the foot on the man's arm so he can kick him in the side with the other.

"You didn't cripple me," Harvey bites out. Kicks again for good measure, aiming for the floating ribs. Brick takes it less well than you'd expect someone with his record to do, but he _does_ have a thigh full of lead shot. Probably absorbing most of his pain tolerance. "A courtesy I may not return."

Brick shakes off his astonishment at the situation along with his pain, and looks up along the shotgun at Harvey, focusing on the 'good' side of his face—everyone does that, he's noticed, chooses a side and interacts with that, as if the two faces cannot _possibly_ be one person—"Look," he says, "Dent, you get that it was nothing personal, right? It was fucked up, I'm really sorry you got…" he flounders. "Fucked up," he settles on. "I was just doing what the Owl wanted."

It was more than that, though, more than following orders—though Harvey flashes to the solemn, meaningless majesty of the Nuremburg trials at the phrase and his twisted lip curls further; what exactly is the precedent worth, that states a man is not bound by an unjust order, nor released by it from personal responsibility? Barely anything even in law-abiding circles, when the unjust command was given by one still in power rather than a functionary of a defeated and reviled regime, not unless the obedient is being thrown to the wolves in his superior's place, and so what is law worth, really?

Jackson had the light of fanaticism in his eyes that day in court. He was willing to go to jail for life if his master required it. He would have committed any atrocity. Because he was _loyal._

"I'm thinking," Harvey declares after a second, when it seems like Jackson might be about to start proffering further excuses. "I could shoot you in the right side of the face right now, and go discuss this with your boss. Since it was all his idea, anyway. Since you were only following orders. But that wouldn't be exactly _symmetrical_ , would it?" He takes his right hand away from stabilizing the weapon, and fishes his lucky double-headed coin from his breast pocket. "Good heads, lucky," he announces, and then turns the coin so the gunrunner can see the defaced side. "Bad heads, you aren't going to have one much longer."

"You're for real with this." The man doesn't seem able to believe that soft targets like ( _former_ ) District Attorneys can also come after you personally.

Harvey has very little left to lose.

He flips the coin, and does not take his eyes off Brick as it spins through the air. The smuggler makes his move anyway, stupidly, as the lawyer reaches up to grab the half-dollar—throws himself aside, toward the foot Harvey's using to pin him down, getting his face out of the line of fire and very nearly knocking Harvey's legs out from under him.

But only almost. Harvey gets the bulk of his weight on the other foot just long enough to skip over Brick's moving body and keep his feet, and he could shoot him dead in the next second as the roll runs out against the legs of a chair, but he doesn't. He kicks him again. Not in the side, this time, but in the bleeding mess of his right thigh, and the mobster doubles up like clockwork. Harvey shoves him onto his back again, and plants his foot this time in the man's diaphragm, so that his slightest imbalance will rob Jackson of breath.

He was told, long ago, that the most effective street fighters aren't the strongest or the best-trained, but the ones who do not hesitate, who can go from stillness to fully committed violence in instants. He understood it then, abstractly, but now he is living it.

While his target gasps on the floor, he lays his lucky piece on the upper edge of his gun, since his hand is busy holding the weapon and he still needs to see what he flipped up.

Unmarred silver. The twisted side of his face grins. "Lucky you." He puts away the coin, takes several long steps back, and lowers the muzzle of the weapon to the flesh of Jackson's left leg.

_Bang!_

Symmetrical.

* * *

It takes him almost an hour and a half to get resettled. The double shotgun blasts, with a more normal gunshot between, were likely to draw _some_ kind of investigation _eventually_ , even if it was just neighbors coming around to see if they could loot Brick's room if he was dead, but he didn't want his prisoner to bleed out or leave a blood trail, so he'd had to slap dressings on his legs before moving him into the car he'd bought (shabby, forgettable, paid with cash to a man who never saw his face) and bringing him here. Jackson regained consciousness on the floor of a rented room not unlike the one Harvey had plucked him from, chained to the foot of an iron bedstead by both arms.

Cuffing his feet together was probably overkill, considering the uselessness of both his legs, but Harvey doesn't want to take chances.

"Good morning," Harvey tells him, snapping on the two cheap steel lamps clipped to the bottom bed-rail in a rush of illumination that leaves the tiny patch of floor where Jackson's sprawled painfully bright, and the rest of the room in shadow. "Though, actually, it's still before midnight. And I have nowhere to be tomorrow, since I lost my job, so we really have all the time in the world to get to know each other better."

The hardened gunrunner's eyes widen a little, even despite his squinting in the sudden light, as he sees the kind of hardware Harvey's assembled for their conversation.

He's particularly proud of the welding torch, and the jar of clearly labelled hydrochloric acid.

An hour later, he hasn't learned as much as he'd like—there are things is seems like Jackson truly doesn't know, like who the Owl is and where he goes when he takes the mask off; other things he closes his teeth on and won't answer, and when Harvey kept pushing, he passed out again. When he came back around, Harvey proceeded with more caution. He's hardly an expert at this, and he'd hate to kill his subject with excessive haste.

Not that he's really doing this for the information, to be honest. That's just a bonus. It'll make it easier to go after the Owl after this—he doesn't imagine he'll be able to manage a long conversation with _him_ , but odds are good that if he plans it right he can shoot the man in the face before anyone cuts him down.

It's not about the information. It's not about torture, either, not exactly. It's about revenge. It's about _balance._ It's about—if he can make Brick Jackson _understand_ , he can get through to anyone. Harvey's had an epiphany. But he's not sure how to convey it outside the bounds of his head, yet, which is frustrating; he's not used to struggling with words. But he doesn't talk about feelings, much, let alone intuitive leaps, not without having already gone back along the path the leap carried him up, and filled in the supporting logic.

It's as though he's always been living in a kaleidoscope, but it was a stationary one and he stood staring into only one facet, one single mirror, and called the pattern he saw there, one fragment of the glory-colored patchwork reflections endlessly redoubled into mathematical precision, his all, and the simple truth. And now the kaleidoscope's been kicked, rolling and bouncing down a hill with Harvey still inside, tossed around anyhow with his eyes falling on mirror after not-yet-broken mirror as the bright beads shift with every instant, casting new exquisite patterns into the mirrored walls, and he can finally _see_ —

There's a balance to the world. There really is, or at least there should be, but it isn't what he thought. What he told himself he believed in, even as he _knew_ what Bruce Wayne was complicit in, even as he saw how many innocent victims there were, who went all unavenged.

 _I only ever bet on a sure thing,_ but nothing is sure, nothing is certain; at any moment the ground might fall from under your feet and you might as well toss yourself into the current and let it fling you where it will. At least you'll have an interesting trip.

Justice is scarce in Gotham, and Harvey can't pretend he hasn't been complicit in that. Let things slide that should never be allowed; let ambition come ahead of duty. He was part of the problem.

(Thinks of that stubborn woman reporter throwing challenging questions in his face for years, speaking truth to power in the hope, maybe, that power might someday care enough to hear her.)

But there _is_ a balance, and things do come around. And he's going to make sure a few scales swing the right way.

Harvey sinks into the one rickety chair that came with the room, the one he discarded instantly for purposes of restraint. Restraint being what he's looking for as he sits, out of reach of Brick, out of reach of the shotgun he left on the bed; he can't lose control now, can't wake up in an hour or two to find he tore the man who burned his face off apart into bloody shreds and can't remember doing it. He is in control of this.

When his hands are steady again and he thinks he's capable of doing so without lashing out, he turns to look at his prisoner. Jackson's arms are hanging slack in the cuffs, and his head's lolled to one side, and his eyes are shut. Briefly, Harvey thinks he's lost consciousness again, but then he catches a shuttle of eye under lid. "I know you're faking, Brick," he says. "But I could pour water on you again, if you want."

He hasn't touched the man's face. Not yet. Every time he thinks about it, raises the razor to try it, he gets a sort of sick fluttery feeling through his chest and into his arms, and stops. Not time yet, he tells himself. Keep it as a threat. Keep building toward it, maybe make sure he's permanently lame, first, get him really, truly _scared,_ get him to tell you everything you want to know, and _then—_

"How about it, Ricky," he says conversationally, turning to level a contemplative look at the ancient, grimy porcelain sink in one corner—bathrooms in this dump are communal, but tenants do get running water, for what it's worth. "I've heard about a method whereby I can effectively simulate drowning without actually killing you. Want to try?"

Jackson's breath hitches, and Harvey feels a pulse of satisfaction. He draws out his lucky coin again. "Look here," he says, and Jackson does, giving up his charade of unconsciousness. "I'll let you pick this time," Harvey tells him. "Good or bad?"

"What," Jackson rasps. Coughs a little. "What happens if I guess right?"

"It's almost like you've played this game before," Harvey muses. Jackson looks like he wants to spit at his feet but doesn't dare. He leans forward. "Call it right, and I won't try the drowning technique."

Jackson looks back at him. His eyes have changed, now. There's still disbelief lurking, but it's flatter and broader, and there's fear now, too, and a resignation Harvey recognizes. The growing acceptance that you've lost control of your life, and can't even pretend anymore.

But mostly they're still the dull, mean, calculating eyes of a career criminal who would never have been his own master no matter how long he'd lived, and they narrow on the defaced coin Harvey's holding up again for him to see. "Good," he says, and coughs again, searching Harvey to see how that choice is received.

Harvey shrugs. It makes no difference to him; chance wins over choice most of the time, anyway. He balances the coin on his thumb as he has a thousand times, and flicks it toward the spiderwebbed ceiling.

A split second later, Harvey stiffens, jerks his head around toward the gloom that's gathered in the end of the room near the painted-shut window. He's not sure if he heard something, or felt a draft, or just picked up the pressure of _something watching,_ but his neck prickles for a heartbeat as he tries to see through the dark—

A bone-white hand flashes from a part of the shadows he wasn't watching, and snatches the spinning bit of silver from the air, before it can land. Something in Harvey jolts, as though one of his major organs has been grabbed instead of his lucky coin, and he's on his feet before he knows it.

A white face leers into the light a moment later, and this time the jerking feeling inside is instinctive fear, of a wide red mouth showing what seem to be far too many teeth in a face that seems almost, but not quite, human. "Harvey Dent," says the face, and already fear has sunk again into more anger, because it's only the Jokester. Mad, of course, but not particularly _dangerous,_ so far as any evidence has ever shown. "And Brick Jackson," he adds, with an equally cordial though somewhat perfunctory nod toward the prisoner, who glowers at him almost as balefully as Harvey is.

"Give that back," Harvey grinds out.

"What, this?" Jokester flicks the coin into the air and it spins brightly, before vanishing into that papery palm once again.

"Yes," he retorts, inches from tackling the clown if he keeps messing around. "That."

"I dunno…" Jokester opens his hand, and it's empty. "Seems to have gone missing."

"This is not a good night to play games with me," Harvey warns. If he attacks him _now,_ and takes him down, he'll have to search him thoroughly to figure out where he hid the damn thing, but that prospect won't hold him off for long. "Give it back." Once he has his coin back, he can address what Jokester is doing here and how he knew and what exactly he's playing at, but first things first.

"Or you'll tie me down and torture me, too?" the clown asks, clicking his tongue, and Harvey begins to understand why Bruce and Owlman expend _so much_ energy hunting this person.

"I could," he says, making it as dark a threat as his own deep voice will allow, and the other man shakes his head.

"See, I don't think you will, though."

"Haven't you heard?" Harvey asks. "I'm _unbalanced_."

"Good word for it," chuckles the clown. "But there's a difference between going after somebody who hurt you, and going after somebody who's just in the way, and I don't think you're past caring about that difference yet."

"Better hope I don't surprise you."

"True," says Jokester, and then skips forward, into Harvey's space enough that he draws back instinctively, putting the shotgun on the bed out of his reach, _stupid_ , and trapping himself against the sink. He's three or four inches taller than the escaped lunatic, which leaves him looking down at a very white part through bizarre purple hair for a second before Jokester tips his face up to grin, and reaches up to pluck Harvey's coin from his acid-ruined ear. With his left hand, the one that _didn't_ catch the coin earlier, which Harvey admits is a nice touch, even as he snatches it back.

"There," says the clown. He leans over to flick on the overhead light fixture and falls back again in the new dim yellow glow toward the no-longer-hidden window, to sprawl onto the tall iron radiator that probably doesn't work. "Now we can have a civilized conversation, huh?"

Harvey closes his hand around the comforting familiarity of his lucky piece, the still-new scratches palpable against his palm. It's warm. It was probably up the man's sleeve, against his skin. "What the hell are you doing here?"

"I've got contacts," Jokester shrugs, as if that statement is boring. "And I can put pieces together. Nobody was taking credit for the hit on Brick here, and you were missing, and then I asked around a little, in the right places. To be honest, Harv, you aren't that inconspicuous."

He shoves that last remark aside. The detective work itself might not reflect any great ability, but the speed with which information apparently flows to this deranged outlaw is astounding, and if Harvey was still District Attorney he would probably be planning to deal with or take advantage of this factor in the future prosecution of Gotham's most ridiculous manhunt. "And _why_ are you _here?"_ he asks again.

"You ever killed anybody?"

Harvey blinks, but the question isn't a departure from the subject, not really, even as it _is_ a refusal to answer him. Or maybe it isn't even that, just a power play, answering questions with questions, and the first one to give in and answer loses. "How is that any of your business?"

"Me neither," Jokester replies, as though Harvey answered him in the negative. Twists his wrist, and flicks a suddenly existent quarter into the air. Just a normal quarter, copper and nickel, not Harvey's fancy, heavy old silver half-dollar, and it spins faster and higher for having so much less weight, glints brighter for being new. The clown keeps his eyes on it and his voice is all bland congeniality. "Come close a few times. It's a big decision, though. I mean, once you kill somebody, that's it. Forever."

Harvey tears his eyes off the bright spinning disk and the madman and takes the three steps to get the abandoned shotgun in hand again, and glance down at his prisoner. "I'm not exactly worrying about the state of my soul," he says drily, slipping his own coin into his breast pocket so he has two hands for the gun. Brick glares at him, but weakly. He's still losing blood. Harvey hopes he doesn't die while the clown keeps him arguing. He hasn't finished making his point.

Jokester snatches the quarter from the air and pushes his eyebrows up. "I actually meant for them. The murdered don't get do-overs."

Harvey draws back his lips to reply to the charge of murder, and lets the words collapse into a hiss, because this _would_ be murder, of course it would, legally. He's _prosecuted_ revenge killing cases. Open and shut. "So you're here to save this piece of scum?"

His challenge skates off an unconcerned shrug. "I can't actually stop you from killing him," says the clown. "I mean, yeah, _right now_ I probably could, not to brag or anything, but if you really want it, you'll go after him again. It'd be harder to get at him twice, but you'd probably manage it, especially if you don't care what happens to you after." He shifts, as though he's just noticed the top of a radiator is actually a pretty uncomfortable seat. "And honestly? I don't that much _care_ if he gets killed. It won't make a big difference either way, but world's prob'ly better off without him."

"And yet you took the trouble to track us down."

"Yeah, well." This shrug is a little less easy, and Jokester studies his toes for a second. "It wasn't that hard, like I said."

"If you don't care whether he survives," Harvey says, narrowing both good eye and bad, almost relishing the pain of flexing the burned skin, "then you came here because of me."

"Pretty much," the clown allows, and flips his hands outward as if shaking off embarrassment, but he's looking at Harvey again. "Murder…the thing about it is you take away all a person's choices forever. But it costs you, too."

"I don't have much left to lose."

That isn't true, though. He felt like it was, when he walked into this, but even without his office or his looks or his wife, he still has his freedom. No one's hunting him. He's a citizen, with all his rights intact. And…he isn't a murderer. Yet.

The mad clown smiles, like he can hear him thinking. "You, Harvey…you're pretty much a jerk."

Harvey lets out a sharp snort of something like amusement in spite of himself. "I would have sent you to prison," he says. "I would have sent you wherever Bruce Wayne wanted you."

"Isn't that up to the judge? I mean, if they ever even caught me. But yeah, like I said, you're a jerk. And, yeah, you were friends with Wayne, and I seriously question a lot of your priorities, policy-wise. So I don't exactly have a lot of reasons to like you, and it's not like you were hurting anyone I really care about protecting, so far."

"Yet here you are."

"For _you_." Jokester opens the hand he closed the quarter in and there's a little paper flower there, now. Origami camellia, not an inch and a half across. He frowns at it, as though it was advertised as the solution to a problem it is patently unfit to confront, and then vanishes it up his sleeve and looks back up. "I've been there, Harv." Jokester bends his head a little forward, and _doesn't_ touch the wreck of his own face in emphasis, which somehow makes it worse.

His eyes are so normal, Harvey realizes with a new twist to his stomach. There's some insanity there, yes, but right now he's calm and solemn enough, just a hint of a smile playing around the corners, that they're mostly just unremarkable, greenish-hazel human eyes, set into a distorted fright mask. "You get the bandages off and look in a mirror, and the doctor tells you it's not gonna get any better than this. It's forever. He _took your face_."

Is that what people will see when they look at him, from now on? Humanity and grotesquerie bundled together, lit with madness from within? Is that all he has to look forward to? His hands spasm on the gunstock, and he pulls his fingers further away from the trigger, as a precaution. Accidents aren't satisfying. Neither choice nor chance, not really, just stupidity. "I'm not you," he says.

"Revenge was all I could think about, too," Jokester answers, or maybe ignores him.

"You blew up seven warehouses full of contraband," Harvey recalls. It was what put the man on the map of law enforcement; word has it he was operating as a vigilante before his debut as a mad clown, but that iteration of the Red Hood never escalated to more than a rumor. Jokester made a big mark from the start.

"Put a bunch of his guys in the hospital, too, and I put together this acid-squirting flower thing that…yeah," the gangly man breaks off with a grimace, throws his weight back into the window frame in some sort of gesture of relinquishment when Harvey winces involuntarily. _Acid._ "I didn't actually use it on anyone, at least. It made a pretty good threat, especially with me as an example. Since then, though, I have to deal with a lot of extra headaches all the time, and the police keep hunting me like I'm the bad guy…"

He shakes his head. "I had less to lose than you, but that doesn't mean I don't wish I'd been a little less messy. And I had people there for me, making sure I didn't go too far." He meets Harvey's eyes again. "Make sure you know what you really want. That's all I'm saying."

"And if I'm sure what I want is to kill Jackson slowly and go after his boss, you'll walk away and let me?"

"Hell no."

Jokester's eyes go wide a second later, and he raises both hands to gesture surrender, the shotgun levelled on his chest. A shotgun blast there, at this range, would be much less survivable than several ordinary bullets. There wouldn't be enough whole tissue left to stitch back together, even if he got medical treatment immediately. Which he wouldn't.

"So we come back to this: you're in my way."

"Harv." There's no madness in those infuriatingly human eyes now, not that he can see, except that he can't find any fear, so the apparent sanity is the craziest thing of all. "Go home. This isn't the end for you. You've got so much to live for. Don't throw yourself away."

"I can't go back." It's more than the memory of Gilda coating every surface in that house. It's more than losing his position and reputation. "I'm not that man anymore."

"Okay." Not pacifying, especially. Jokester's reinvented himself at least once; maybe he does think this makes perfect sense. "But that doesn't mean whoever you are now deserves to get trash-binned. I bet he's worth at least as much as the last guy ever was."

 _And what was he worth, do you think?_ Harvey wants to snarl, but doesn't. Maybe he doesn't want to hear the answer. He turns his back, instead. Glares down at his…prisoner.

He can't bring himself to think 'victim.' Because Jackson deserved all of this and ten times as much, for what he did to Harvey, for what he's done to so many others, and what the guns he brought in did. The children shot, or watching their parents bleeding out, or simply orphaned on the street. Every drop of blood Owlman has wrung from people who did nothing to deserve it but be poor, and vulnerable, and within his reach.

For everything Harvey never did to stop him, and all his kind.

(Thinks of Vicki Vale again, the way she stormed forward to help him without hesitating, he who had never earned anything from her; this wasn't what she saved him for, he knows. Thinks, against his will, of Gilda, and the thought of her horrified look stokes the fire in his chest again but it's cold comfort, now.)

"How did it come to this?" he asks, and only realizes he said it aloud once he's already done it.

He hears the Jokester's feet hit the floor, and he pads a little closer, but stops before Harvey has to get tense, or turn around. "That's a good question," says the strange, slightly cracked tenor voice that sounds both much more noticeably not-quite-right and much more normal, when you can't see the face that goes with it. "But a better one is…where is it going from here?"

And he doesn't have an answer.

Jackson's eyes have fallen closed, and he's breathing in gulps again, even though Harvey hasn't touched him since before they were interrupted.

His hands tighten around the gunstock, and he slides his finger back inside the trigger guard. Enough. Time to end this, the only way it ever could end. Having your head blown off might not be clean, but at least it has to be quick.

"Harvey."

Jokester says it quietly. Understandingly. Like they're friends.

His voice sounds like a weird echo of Bruce, when he called Harvey's name as he climbed out of the limo on his seventh wedding anniversary, and gave a recommendation Harvey didn't understand was meant as an ultimatum. He doesn't turn his head.

"You can go now," he says.

"You know I can't."

And now Harvey _does_ look, even though he doesn't want to. There's such sympathy in the horribly sane madman's face. His aggravating, hideous, presumptuous face, and half of Harvey wants to snap his gun around and fire and blow him away.

But the blood and the last wheeze of shredded lungs; Harvey's never seen someone die like that but he's seen so many, many crime scene photos entered as evidence in so many, many cases where he fought to get justice for the dead, and he's got the fresh blood to look at right here, drying into Jackson's clothes and the wooden floor. And Jokester's right, damn him. He's not so far gone he can kill someone for getting in his way.

His eyes fall back onto the drips of blood, and drag themselves up to the body that shed them, and so long as they don't drift above the neck to recognize the object of his hate he can see it as just another crime scene, as remote as an evidential photograph, and as condemning.

Wonders if _that_ was why he could not bring himself to touch Jackson's face—not because it was going too far, not because he couldn't do to anyone else what had been done to him, but because if a mask of blood or bubbling burn had turned the man unrecognizable, Harvey would no longer have been able to believe his own justifications.

The words _what have I done?_ fall into his head all of a single piece, one solid-forged question, and they fit there in a slot perfectly shaped for them, carved out with every move of the razor, every drip of weak acid over a fresh wound, every lick of the torch on metal to get it hot enough to cauterize as it cut.

He doesn't say them.

He stands silent, instead. Watching this man who was the tool to ruin him breathe.

"If I let him go," he says, "he'll be able to testify I tortured him." Too late to back out now.

"He could," Jokester agrees, bright and easy. "But he won't. Not unless he wants Owlman to know about the payoffs he took to redirect ammo shipments to the Jade Dragon gang. Isn't that _right_ , Bricky-boy?"

The world sways under his feet, pieces falling apart into new patterns. New possibilities, laid out at his feet.

"You're blackmailing him?" It takes Harvey a few seconds to get through the shock and (utterly hypocritical) affront at the idea, and see that it won't work. " _Somebody_ has to have done it, and I'm the obvious suspect, with no alibi and an official diagnosis of mental instability."

" _Aha,_ you miss the full brilliance of my plan. Hey, Brick," he says, giving Jackson's shoulder a little shake, winning his full, slightly bleary attention. "I'm gonna take you to a hospital, and if you're lucky they'll fix you up good enough you'll still be able to walk once you've had some recovery time. Now, if you want your feathery boss to not hear about you fleecing him—huh, that sounds weird, maybe 'downing?' Nah, that's what you do to a drink. Anyway, things are gonna start getting better for you starting from now, and if you want them to not get way, _way_ worse again, you just tell anyone who asks that all this was me. Mr. Dent never came anywhere near you. Isn't that right?"

There's some hatred in Jackson's eyes, and definitely resentment, but mostly just pain, and relief, and maybe the edge of something like gratitude. He nods. "Yeah, you freak show," he agrees weakly. "No problem. Long as word never gets back to the Owl or the cops 'bout witnesses like the folks who ratted to _you_."

"It won't," the clown declares, with perfect assurance.

Brick narrows his eyes, but nods again, sharply in acceptance. Nothing is less constant than interest, as the sociologist said, but apparently Brick's mad loyalty goes only so far. He would go to prison rather than turn evidence against the Owlman, but that was because he feared the consequences of open betrayal, not because he places his boss's wellbeing above his own. And that means that, for as long as it remains in Brick's interests to keep the secret, their little conspiracy will be safe.

And unless it fails some other way, the fact of the conspiracy _existing_ is enough to keep its secrecy in Brick's interest, even without the threat about his embezzlement.

"Good!" White hands move to adjust the dressings on Brick's legs, then, tightening the one on the more serious injury on the left with a delicate care that doesn't match the clown's attitude, or his declared lack of interest in whether or not the scumbag dies. "Any ribs broken?" he asks, prodding at them, and apparently concluding not. "Okay, you're stable to transport. Hey, Harvey," Jokester says, turning to him again, casual as if they were friendly office colleagues taking off for the weekend. (Not that Harvey had had a whole weekend off in recent memory, until very recently.) "Can I borrow your car?"

It takes Harvey a minute to be able to respond. He's still trying to process that this is real. "You're…you're going to take the fall for me."

"Yeah. Well, not the _fall,_ hopefully, just the rap, but I'm already wanted for lots of things. You've got a lot more to lose, still, Harv. Let me do this."

Harvey swallows. The seething self-awareness that's been troubling him more and more since—the non-accident, since Gilda, since _something_ —seems to have gone into sharp, high definition, and he knows very well that whatever the mad clown says, taking this on isn't nothing. Most of what he's wanted for is destruction of property. Criminal negligence. This…what Harvey's done is on a whole different level.

"I don't deserve this," he says. The words inadequate to encompass their own truth.

The Jokester heaves a sigh, shoulders slumping dramatically. "Harvey. The way I see it…all you gotta do to deserve being helped is need helping. If there's earning to be done at all…it happens after. When somebody else needs something you can give 'em." He straightens up, briskly waving a hand. "Besides, it's not like I won't be able to spin this into something useful. Give me a sike-o- _logikal_ edge, y'know? So, can I borrow your car?"

Harvey lets the breath out of his lungs, and then digs into his pocket. "You can _have_ it," he answers, tossing over the keys. "It cost three hundred dollars and I'm never going to use it again."

"Three hundred from a stranger and it runs?" Jokester marvels, carefully hoisting Jackson up onto his back in an awkward modified fireman's carry that puts most of the weight on his torso but doesn't let his legs swing. "Come on, Brick. Let's get in the stolen car Harvey bought and get you some surgery and good drugs."

He grins at Harvey, then, and while madness still twinkles in his eyes, Harvey thinks he looks a lot more human than he did before. Maybe it's just about learning how to look. "Wait like twenty minutes before you come out, okay? And then go home. You're gonna be okay."

And with that promise, the two of them are gone, and it's just Harvey, alone in a room with the truth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Potential-trigger warning for frank though not explicit discussion of torture by POV character upon minor villain. (Also for acts of destruction committed while in dissociative fugue state, but if this is triggering for you I respectfully recommend that you avoid stories about Harvey Dent.)
> 
> The closest any real US coin comes to resembling Harvey's, which is generally drawn far too large for a quarter, is the Kennedy half-dollar, the first of which in 1964 _were_ also the last mostly-silver US coins ever struck for general circulation. (America held off putting men's heads on our coinage for over a century after independence. Kings, you know.) So you can picture the man on the coin as JFK if you want specificity and realism.


	3. Edge

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know, I honestly cannot tell whether the DC writers in developing Two-Face just took his basic motif and then threw two-related things at him, resulting in coincidental overlap with the demesnes of the Roman god Janus, or whether there was intentional classical referencing going on. (I mean, Janus was associated with coinage _because of_ a coin's two differing faces.) 
> 
> I've always been partial to him in his role as god of thresholds.

Harvey does go home. Tidies what he can manage of the mess he made of the front hall, the bedroom, and the stairs (not, to his slight surprise, Gilda's abandoned studio, and he faces one of the paintings she left behind for a whole minute before he has to turn away) until the adrenaline has begun to settle and the tension begun to fade under the monotony of piling broken wood into his arms and carrying it down to the rarely-used fireplace in the drawing room.

He lights a fire from the unmendable shards of what was really some very nice furniture, and makes himself a sandwich, and pours himself a double shot of whiskey, and settles down on the sofa facing the fireplace, trying not to think too much.

* * *

A week later, a man in a greatcoat and a fedora, with his face hidden under a mask that is black on the left and white on the right, and sheer enough to see through where it stretches over his eyes, steps out of the mouth of an alley and punches one of the Owl's legbreakers so hard that the man crumples into unconsciousness, entirely interrupting his intended activity of taking a blackjack to the back of the Jokester's head.

A pistol is shoved into the masked man's face by one of the collapsing thug's cohorts, and he grabs it, twists it until it's pointing at nothing but the ceiling, then raps that man across the wrist with the blackjack he took off the first one. There's a crack, and Harvey gets the gun off him and takes advantage of the opening so created to land what should be a very painful kick.

He has a gun of his own in a shoulder holster, but he doesn't intend to use it except in truly dire extremity. Escalation never leads anywhere good.

"Hey there!" Jokester cackles, weaving under another gun and jabbing the man who holds it in the gut. "Glad you could make it!"

Like he'd been issued an invitation. Like he was _expected._ Is that a joke, or another uncanny moment of insight, or just a headgame—and if so, with whose head?

But it's hard to suspect the man of toying with him as they fall to fighting, back to back, and Harvey knows the cooperation's not his doing, it's all the Jokester, maneuvering around his attacks and covering his back and calling out warnings like they've done this a dozen times before. Harvey's grateful for the wild, unquestioning insanity of it, because he knows that if he stops to think about what he's doing he'll realize how unqualified he is and what a terrible, risky idea this was, and then he won't have that coin-not-yet-fallen absoluteness that's all he has to make him dangerous, and then he'll be no use at all.

A police siren begins to draw near as they win the fight, and Harvey glances at his ad-hoc partner, who grins up at him, sidelong, and gives a jerk of the head up the boulevard.

They run, together, the smaller man laughing as he runs in brief, yelping gasps that are all he can spare the air for, and Harvey can't even spare that, because for all he has longer legs he can barely keep up, until they've left the unconscious bully-boys and the shaken shopholder and the police far behind, and Jokester collapses against a chain-link fence with a great _whoof!_

Grins again, slyly under his ridiculous purple eyebrows. "Didn't 'spect to see you quite this soon, Dent," he says, with a teasing twinkle.

Harvey feels awkward, suddenly, a kid dressed up in his father's clothes. Clenches his fingers in the sleeve of his coat. "Uhm. I made a mask."

"I noticed." Jokester tilts his head to one side, then the other. Holds up thumb and forefinger at right angles, like he's framing a scene. "It's nice. Sort of Art Deco, sort of lunar…you wanna stick a couple contrasting dots on and go for a taijitu?"

Harvey's mouth drops open under the fabric, and then he starts to laugh. He laughs until he cries a little, and glances up to find Jokester waiting, completely patient, wearing a crooked little smile and doing a thing with his hands that seems to say ' _I don't know how I pulled off being quite that funny, but I'll take it.'_

It's a good thing he isn't pushing to know, because Harvey doesn't want to explain. Artistic commentary had been part of his life so long it had passed from the realm of vaguely annoying into simply a facet of existence years and years ago, and then it packed its bags and left. And then to have it pop up here, the last place he would have expected, when he's _starting over_ …the Jokester reminded him of Gilda, and the thing is, the really ridiculous, utterly hilarious thing is…it didn't hurt. He thought of her, and for the first second it didn't hurt.

It's going to take a while. He's perfectly aware of that. The betrayal is never going to completely leave him, even. But he's going to get better.

He can't go back. But he can, he really, truly _can_ go forward.

"Couldn't you just call it a yin-yang?" he asks, when he's finally stopped laughing, patting a little at his face so the couple of tears will soak into the mask and get on with evaporating instead of making him itch. The bad side itches enough on its own.

He means the question. _Everybody_ says yin-yang. Archeologists studying the Etruscans say yin-yang. If you'd asked Harvey what the Chinese word for the symbol was, he couldn't have told you, although he _had_ heard it at least once before, so the context was enough. He wouldn't have pegged the clown for the technically precise type, or even the type to fuss over cultural sensitivity.

Jokester shudders. "I have a Taoist friend who'd hang me up for the crows if she heard me do that. No fear."

Fair enough. "And I don't care for the Gotham Herald naming me Ying-Yang Face, so no."

The smaller man laughs out loud, at that, and swings his long-handled hammer up to rest easily over his shoulder. "Prob'ly a good call. You're in for the long haul, then?"

"Yeah." Harvey fingers the coin in his pocket, feeling his thumbnail catch in the grooves he added. "I've got…a lot of paying to do."

Paying back Jokester for saving him from his own blindness. Paying back everyone he ran roughshod over in his conviction that his walk of life was the only one that really mattered. Paying back Owlman for what he took, and Bruce Wayne for his betrayal.

And paying forward. He lost everything. But he has a second chance.

And he'll do better this time.

No matter what.

"Well, my skull owes you one already. Good to have ya onside." The mad clown claps him on the shoulder, again like they're friends, like he's already forgotten everything he has reason to hate about him, and Harvey wonders if his actual friends get any warmer treatment than people he's just being friendly with.

Thinks they probably do, just from the way the man said _I had people there for me._

He pulls out his lucky half-dollar, balances it on his thumbnail, and gives it a practiced _flick,_ with no concern for throwing it too high and having it bounce off the ceiling, since they're out under the sky. Jokester follows the arc up with his eyes, silent, and is still silent when Harvey catches it in one black leather glove, lays it flat on the back of the opposite wrist.

Only after he's looked at the scarred side for a full breath and a half does Jokester say, musingly, "That's _gotta_ have put a gouge in the collector's value." He huffs out a small laugh, like he's made some kind of obscure private joke rather than just a terrible pun, and looks up at Harvey's masked face, instead, with only a few sparks of madness in his friendly eyes. "But that doesn't make it _worth_ less."

Harvey swallows, and ducks his chin. Takes another, longer breath, and puts the coin away, reminding himself to ask the Jokester to teach him how to do the coin-disappearing trick sometime. "I'm selling my house," he says, not sure why, but wanting to say it.

When he was getting the house listed, he noticed for the first time something he'd always known: that his was the only name on the deed. That he'd been coming home to Gilda painting in _his_ house, not _theirs,_ and never realized it might matter. And for the first time, he felt he _understood_ why his wife had left him. Not just because he'd become ugly, not just because he was losing his mind. Because he was, as a matter of fact, a colossal self-righteous _bastard._

It's too late to make things right with Gilda—she won't even see him again to sign the papers; her lawyer says she's already left the country, and won't say where to, and Harvey wonders if she's really that scared of him, or if it's mostly shame.

Jokester nods, assimilating this information with consciously-ironic gravitas. "I could really go for some pie," he announces, as if imparting this truth constitutes some sort of exchange.

Before Harvey can think of anything to respond to this, or more than vaguely summon the theory that he may have accidentally begun some sort of inanity contest (which he is clearly foredoomed to lose), the clown continues, "there's a little diner up on fifth, has bottomless coffee for a dollar fifty and does a cherry pie like somebody's really-good-at-baking mom, and the staff are all my pals. You wanna join me?"

"That sounds…pretty swell," Harvey says, almost pulling off casual, after a second spent swallowing down a lump of pure relief.

"You bet it does," Jokester declares proudly, and marches them off up a narrow street whose sign appears to have been stolen.

"So," the clown asks, as they walk, "what _are_ you thinkin' you'll call yourself?"

Harvey shrugs, wondering if he should take his mask off now, or wait until pie arrives. No point just rolling it up to the nose to eat, when his distinctive scarring would be perfectly recognizable from chin alone. "Still working on that."

"Want me to help you brainstorm?" he sounds excited as a puppy, and Harvey raises his eyebrows.

"No offense, but you have purple hair and wear a green suit, and wanted me to dress as Ying-Yang Face."

The man whose disconcerting wisdom and self-sacrifice saved Harvey from himself mere days ago pokes out his strangely-normal tongue, and blows a raspberry. "Fine, then. _Don't_ ask for my input."

Harvey shrugs, as they round a corner and his guide orients toward what must be their destination, shabby and aluminum-sided, tucked under the track of the west elevated extension, bearing a bright, freshly-retouched sign that says _Louise's_. "I have a feeling I'm going to be getting it anyway."

The latch to Louise's diner clicks open, the door swings wide, a hanging string of bells jangles; the Jokester laughs. "Well, you're not wrong."

Harvey lets the door fall closed behind him, and thinks that's really going to be okay.


End file.
